Plutopalooza

[TomK]

Oh, and Charon:

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/charon-in-detail

[AKpilot]

Wow! Such detail on distant, tiny Charon! Amazing! Here I thought I was cool in my little Tropospheric Chariot.

Keep Looking Up!

AKpilot

We're all here, because we're not all there!

[Ino]

Have you seen the newly released 8400 pics of the Apollo Moon landing. I've been thru a few hundred and find them mesmerizing;
https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/

Here's some selected pics in a story if you don't want to go thru 8400 pics;
http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2...now-online

http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/2/944295...tos-flickr

[TomK]

All fake, never happened... []

The proof!

https://youtu.be/GuwyY2DzO2I

Thanks for the links, Ino, some wonderful pictures!

[TomK]

HOTPE,

"I haven't paid a lot of attention to what New Horizons has discovered about Pluto's geologic composition, but perhaps the lack of color is due to the planet/dwarf planet/Kuiper Belt object consisting of a moon-like (earth moon) material? Or a frozen ice-like coating? It is after all, the Antarctica of the solar system, and much of that continent is colorless, except for the flags and parkas"

My apologies, I should have responded to your post much earlier; for some reason I missed it.

The lack of color is simply due to the difficulties of transmitting those data from so far away. However, your point is interesting on its own. Our eyes are tuned to visible sunlight and their filter is quite large, i.e., if something is bright at a very specific and precise wavelength, our eyes can't discern that, that light just gets added to the whole visible spectrum we see all at once.

However, if you take images through various filters, then things look quite different. Now, I haven't checked what filters New Horizons has (I'll fix that shortly), but if, for example, they used some three-micron filters (infrared), then emission from large molecules can be seen. These molecules are often formed after being subjected to UV radiation or, here, on Earth, BBQs. The brown stuff at the poles of both Pluto and Charon has me interested, because they may indicate that kind of processing, but since I don't know what filters were used (yet), I can't tell for certain if this is a blind alley or real UV-processing on the poles. But if that's the case, why is the processing only occurring there and what created such a new surface on much of Pluto?

Apologies, just thinking out loud, lots of mysteries to solve...

[pahoated]

Pluto has a blue haze atmosphere and water ice confirmed:

http://o.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/midas/43...inal-2.png

This was the best image of Pluto from Hubble, a space telescope:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/PI-P...-Pluto.jpg

This is a recent false color:
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/...-color.jpg

Back to TMT. The extra-solar planets that are being discovered by Keck are resolving these Jupiter size planets to the equivalent of 4 pixels, one being white indicating an atmosphere. This is why more resolution is needed.

"Aloha also means goodbye. Aloha!"

[TomK]

"Back to TMT. The extra-solar planets that are being discovered by Keck are resolving these Jupiter size planets to the equivalent of 4 pixels, one being white indicating an atmosphere. This is why more resolution is needed."

On its own, this statement is nonsense. What article does this come from? What's the plate scale? How large are the pixels? Why does a planet being white indicate an atmosphere? How does increased resolution help determine color?

[TomK]

First science results from New Horizons' Pluto flyby have been published.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34546042

PS. The actual journal article is available at:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/62...5.full.pdf (PDF) and
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6258/aad1815.full (html).

[pahoated]

quote:

---

Originally posted by TomK
On its own, this statement is nonsense. What article does this come from? What's the plate scale? How large are the pixels? Why does a planet being white indicate an atmosphere? How does increased resolution help determine color?

---

Your depth of ignorance regarding imaging is mystifying. It is almost like somebody asking what is an A and what is a B and what is an alphabet and who authorized the alphabet. You keep demonstrating you are not an optics guy and unfamiliarity with digital imaging especially. "How large are the pixels" is like somebody asking "Where is the tightening area on a nut?". A pixel is just a pixel, it is a fundamental with no dimension. I know you are going through malihini meltdown so you are of little notice to me. I am seriously stunned by the level of your computer ignorance but it is understandable you have been isolated from the outside world for 25 years and suddenly find yourself out of your comfortable bureaucrat desk, not having kept up with computer technology for the whole time. A true knowledgeable scientist comments on the Pluto digitial imaging:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/...arf-planet
“We went from having images that were maybe three pixels across to images thousands of pixels across, so we are essentially seeing Pluto for the first time in terms of its landscapes and geological story. It’s completely new and completely spectacular,” said John Spencer, a member of the science team at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

"Aloha also means goodbye. Aloha!"

[TomK]

"You keep demonstrating you are not an optics guy and unfamiliarity with digital imaging especially. "How large are the pixels" is like somebody asking "Where is the tightening area on a nut?". A pixel is just a pixel, it is a fundamental with no dimension. I know you are going through malihini meltdown so you are of little notice to me."

What a load of codswallop.

Astronomical instruments use detectors with pixels matched to the resolution of both the instrument and telescope. They have a physical size, usually, for infrared observations, measured in microns. If they didn't, then 1) array manufacturers are designing mini-black holes and 2) how can I, or anyone else, see individual pixels on an array if they are dimensionless?

I really don't know what's wrong with you, but something isn't right.

"A true knowledgeable scientist comments on the Pluto digitial imaging:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/...arf-planet
“We went from having images that were maybe three pixels across to images thousands of pixels across, so we are essentially seeing Pluto for the first time in terms of its landscapes and geological story. It’s completely new and completely spectacular,” said John Spencer, a member of the science team at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado."

Of course the images of Pluto cover so many more pixels on New Horizons. The images were taken a few thousand miles away rather than several hundred million miles from ground-based observatories.

Your understanding of how things work in physics, astronomy and optics is so profoundly wrong it's mind-boggling.

Dimensionless pixels. Jeeze...